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Inside the stunning vote, a revealing demographic
double whammy
Surprising election results signal a more profound
change than merely a new government
by Kevin Potvin
The Republic
Holy cow, what happened on November 16? One might plausibly
imagine that that hippie finally pulled himself all the way
up to the top of the water tower and spiked the taps with
acid, at long last turning on and tuning in every dark corner
of the Vancouver electorate.
The reality might not be far off. Consider the unique confluence
of demographic trends just now breaking over this city at
the point of the November 16 civic election.
There are two age cohorts to consider: the first contains
those between the ages of 55 and 65, and the second contains
those between the ages of 25 and 35. The first thing to notice
is that the younger cohort are the children of the older cohort,
inasmuch as the time around 30 years old is the prime childbearing
period, and the older cohort is precisely 30 years older than
the younger cohort.
Also notice that the younger cohort is now centered on that
important period around 30 years old, so that these are the
people who are just now having kids, dealing with schools
and buying their first houses. That is, they are just now
becoming politically aware of school boards and property taxes
and city services to a degree that often first motivates people
to vote or to become involved in civic elections in deeper
ways.
The older cohort, meanwhile, are just now retiring, and unlike
similarly-aged cohorts of the past, have a long and healthy
non-working life stretching out in front of them. Not only
are they retiring earlier, but because of better working conditions,
careers that were generally less physical than what their
parents were subjected to, and improved health, they are bound
to be far more active and engaged in social life of all kinds.
They haven't got kids' educations to finance anymore, and
they've paid off their homes. They are looking for something
to get involved with, and bridge games or knitting bees ain't
gonna cut it for them.
It also happens to be so--most importantly--that this 55
to 65 age cohort were the prime '60s generation, which was
like no other generation of youth before. These people were
between 20 and 30 years old in 1967--when acid hit town and
everybody got turned on to the larger picture, and riffed
through the night conceptualizing things like new social models,
new ways to live, new priorities in life, and--particularly
poignant for the purposes of this article--new ways to make
cities.
This "new city" motif was a central feature of
the intense social and intellectual scene that descended on
Vancouver from all over the country around 1967. And the ever-present
acid enabled them to imagine all manner of different ways
of re-constructing urban life which, at the time, had come
to a virtual evolutionary standstill.
Many things were tried, and some of them were actually good
ideas. A young Mike Harcourt, for example, set up a street-front
legal aid office to dispense free advice to those unjustly
ensnared by the local constabulary. Local merchants of pot
and acid willingly tithed 10% of their earnings to help support
this much needed initiative.
New NPA councillor Peter ("I never exhaled") Ladner
may recall all this. Jane Jacobs, lately the hero of the new
urban renaissance, got all her bright ideas from hanging around
in the same time with a similar crowd in Toronto.
Reality rolls on, however, and this age cohort got married,
had kids, and bought houses, and so for the last number of
decades has been unheard from while beavering away at the
mortgage and tuition payments.
But as the election on November 16 made brightly obvious,
they did not forget what startling images played across the
walls they stared at in their not-so-misspent youth. The Downtown
Eastside is certainly not what they had in mind for the "new
city."
And now that they've raised their noses from their grindstones,
they appear prepared to see their dimly recalled imaginations
put into action. How else to account for the fact that neighborhoods
like Dunbar, Point Grey, and MacKenzie Heights voted so overwhelmingly
to deep-six the likes of Jennifer Clarke and George Puil--who,
while we're on the subject, should not be allowed to get away
without an old-fashioned tar-and-feathering, if only for the
people's richly-deserved entertainment. That would be real
Funcouver!
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